


don't forget (it has already won)

by vicariously kingly (pelted)



Series: Monsters and Cowboys AU [3]
Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolves and Vampires, Gen, Pre-Game Story, headcanons for backstories and also much fake werewolf lore, in which Arthur makes for a poor lone wolf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-09-01 07:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16760257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pelted/pseuds/vicariously%20kingly
Summary: There hadn’t always beenthe pack.For a long time, there hadn’t even been a pack.





	don't forget (it has already won)

There hadn’t always been _the pack._

For a long time, there hadn’t even been a pack.

There had been Arthur, town scamp, and his father, town drunk, and their monthly monster runs. 

Then they’d caught his father with his hands in a post office’s cash box and they’d strung him up when he was no more monstrous than any other whiskey-soaked fool, and it became just Arthur, fourteen years old and armed with nothing more than the clothes on his back, a ragged journal containing a handful of photos, two dollars, and his father’s ancient pistol. 

How his father had contradicted the lycan disease, he’d never been told and he’d never found out. It was a constant for their family throughout Arthur’s life, though he was sure his father and he were the only ones in a tri-county area. 

Admittedly, The nights weren’t so bad. At full moon, there was nothing to worry about. His father, for all his flaws, never once forgot to take them deep into the countryside during the brightest night, far from even the loneliest trading post. Those nights guaranteed food fit to sink their teeth into. Moreover, being the town degenerates - especially a pair that moved as much as the two of them - meant nobody picked up on their moon-related troubles.

The days, though-- those dragged on.

His father leaving the picture was a blessing in most ways. One way it was not became clear when the town that hung him began to make disparaging remarks about an orphan of the same bad blood running roughshod and reckless. Arthur had left before they decided to put a second noose on the big tree where his father swung for four days, uncared for and largely forgotten til the mayor returned from vacation and groused on its unsightliness. 

Three towns and two months later, despite all his practice, Arthur found he wasn’t as good at keeping himself together as he’d thought. 

Rustling farm animals on the full moon was dangerous business. Besides it being one of the few rules his dad adhered to, he knew that because anybody with a lick of sense knew it. The lazy creatures tempted a hungry wolf, yes, but the risk of being sighted, hassled or shot was too high. Anyway, the thrill of the hunt was part of the fun.

So Arthur told himself for the first full moon without his father. His failing to catch anything dampened the hunt’s excitement, but he reasoned it was the beast mourning his father’s passing that threw off his concentration and typical success.

So Arthur reminded himself on the second moon without his father, too.

So Arthur forgot by the third moon, hungry and desperate.

The beast awoke to Arthur’s stomach-gnawing terror. Set to provide for himself but too slow to run down rabbit and too weak to hunt deer, he ended up in a small rancher’s pig pen with a mouthful of salivating hope and hunger.

He kept his wits about him only because the beast and he were on the same page: they needed to eat. They had to eat. They _would_ eat. A mouthful of pork and they’d be good enough to run again. 

He remembered the pigs squealing and screaming, his scent giving him away immediately as he unthinkingly approached from upwind. He remembered one giving him a kick to the muzzle, making his teeth rattle in his jaws. He remembered another body-checking him into the muck, and the fire in his front leg as it broke. He stayed where he landed, trying to make sense of a world suddenly set on spinning. 

The world waited for no one.

He remembered a cold hand plucking him out of the mud by the scruff and giving him a shake. He’d tucked tail and tried to struggle out and run by then, positive he was set to meet his end. A gangly, starved creature, he’d looked less wolf and more overgrown coyote. Certainly not something worth saving. But the grip hadn’t loosened. If anything, it tightened, gleeful in its catch even as said catch scratched at its arm and streaked mud down its nice clothing.

The surprised, happy laugh of Dutch van der Linde was one Arthur could never forget.

(The smell of alcohol, Hosea, and a woman’s perfume masked his scent that night, he’d later find. It was just as well he hadn’t realized off the bat - he never would have guessed what Dutch was.)

“Hosea!” Another chuckle, whiskey-soaked and a breath away from hiccuping. Another shake by the scruff, and Arthur stopped his struggling, his disorientation rising viciously. “Look here. This mongrel looks strange, doesn’t it? What a funny looking creature.”

“You’re drunk. All the more reason we _should_ return to camp.” The man materialized out of nowhere, as far as Arthur could tell. He squinted at his friend, apparently uncaring of any funny-looking mongrel. “What are you doing rooting around in a pigsty?”

“ _Look_.” Arthur’s hind legs hit the fence as he was dragged over and around it, the man with a steel grip swinging him up to show off to his friend. “It’s-- different. Very strange. Very unique.”

Hosea didn’t even look at Arthur. “It’s clearly a coyote. Or the farmer’s ugly mutt.”

“Not clearly if there’s two options.” This, declared with good humor. “Anyway, it doesn’t look like either of those. Actually _look_ , you whiskey-soaked bastard.”

The other rolled his eyes, then reared back very exaggeratedly, a hand raised and finger pointed toward the other’s chest. _Clearly_ , ready for a drunken debate. 

Before the man launched into it, he paused. The reason for his hesitation became known to Arthur a moment too late-- as the reason was a low whining, and the low whining was from him, and he very much would like to stop whining.

“Poor thing,” Hosea finally said, his fire disappearing in a rush as he actually looked at Arthur. “You can count its ribs. And it does look… odd.”

“That’s what I was saying,” Dutch replied with a spot of triumph. “It’s too big to be a coyote. And its coloring! That’s no dog’s coloring.”

“It’s covered in mud. You can’t tell its coloring.”

“I can tell enough.”

“Hm. So, what? Congratulations. You rescued this farmer’s pigs. Do you want to ask him for a thank-you?” That idea seemed to amuse Hosea, as a snort cut into his words.

“Maybe I will,” Dutch returned, just as amused. “Can you imagine? Hello, mister! I’ve rescued your pigs. Oh, no, no trouble. Well, a little trouble. Please, write a thank you in green.”

“No, no, that’s too direct.” The two sniggered at the image, though Arthur couldn’t see what was so funny. “Ask for a pig, instead.”

“Rescued your pigs from a strange dog, mister--” a laugh, Arthur dropping to the man’s side as he swayed forward and nearly overbalanced, “-- now give me your pigs!”

The two collapsed into one another, snickering and wheezing and generally being a rambunctious pair without any cares. 

Arthur, his neck hurting from the man’s iron grip, wished to be free and forgotten by these sloppy humans.

The beast, its neck hurting and its stomach still empty, saw an opportunity and knew what to do. It was a decision Arthur never would have made if not desperate.

For the first time to a human, the beast formerly known as Arthur Morgan opened his maw and sunk his sharp teeth into Dutch’s thigh, his fangs piercing the work pants with little trouble. 

The idea was to get the drunkard to drop him. Instead, decay and rot filled his mouth. Blood putrid and thick flowed down his throat, unnatural and abhorrent.

It found no delicious flesh or to-be kin in the man. Instead, it tasted death.

Hosea yelled in shock, jumping back. 

The one with the wolf pup’s teeth in his leg did not.

“Stupid mutt,” he said, and dropped Arthur-- only to grab an ear and give it a nasty twist, which startled Arthur into letting go with a high yelp.

Dutch gave him a swift kick in the side as he fell back. The shoe caught him under the ribs, robbing him of air; his bad leg took the brunt of weight as he tried to catch himself, and so he collapsed, limbs akimbo.

Lights appeared in the farm house’s window.

The previously carefree drunkards uttered a curse. One took to running without pause, beelining for the forest’s protection at the edge of the farmer’s land. The other scooped up Arthur around the midriff, squeezed the air out of his lungs, and followed.

Together, Arthur out-of-breath and utterly confused on what had happened and what was happening, they hightailed it out of there.

The farmer’s potshot into the dark went wide. They made it to the forest to the tune of angry yelling, which only became a point of amusement and laughter for Dutch and Hosea when they finally stopped to take stock. 

Hosea, out of breath. Dutch, not so much.

Between laughing breaths, Hosea asked: “Why’ve you-- why’d you grab the mutt, Dutch? Farmer would’ve put it out of its misery.” 

“I reckon it’s no dog,” he insisted, “and I’m going to prove that to you.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“Just got to wash it up. Then you’ll see.”

Momentary silence, as the two stared each other down in the night’s bright light.

Then, in tandem, they snorted and barked out laughter anew. 

Once the laughter died down and Hosea could breathe again, Dutch hoisted Arthur higher under his arm, apparently unconcerned with his weight or the possibility of being bit again (not that Arthur would-- one mouthful of rotten flesh had been enough), roughly patted Arthur on the head, and started in a seemingly random direction. Hosea followed behind.

The journey took what seemed to be an age and a half. Arthur didn’t fight it more than a few token struggles and low, miserable whines. He was exhausted and starving; he was afraid, of the corpse carrying him and his disregard for a werewolf’s bite; he was too busy catching his breath, and realizing he had no real hope of limping his way out of the situation if he got free, anyway. If they lost interest, he might’ve made it to a clump of forest to wait out the rest of the night. But when the moon set and the sun rose and the transformation back sapped whatever energy he’d built up as the beast, he had no idea where he could possibly go. 

(He’d tried getting himself involved with his father’s type of people, just as his father had always involved him with them without his agreeing. But they’d asked for more than his stupid pride had been willing to give. Now, without even them as an option, he felt like one idiotic son of a bitch for turning them down.) 

As the moon set, they took him to their camp where they dunked him in a cold river’s shallow stream. As he stood, shivering and crippled, they squinted at him with rapidly fading interest. Eventually, they declared the matter one best left to a more sober morning, put a rope around his neck, tied him to a thin tree away from their two horses, and ambled off to their tents.

By their gait, it was unlikely they would remember the night.

(Unfortunately: they did remember the night.)

At their tent flaps, they paused to talk, their voices poorly hushed. 

As the sun rose, Arthur willed them to go into their tents. They did not. Somewhere, someone was laughing at him.

He pawed at the rope. His paws, more nimble than a wolves’ but nothing compared to a human’s, did nothing. 

He put his whole body weight against the rope, willing it to break. It did not. He ceased pulling as it only tightened the bite around his neck.

He whined, snarled, and let loose his best growls. The men paused to peer at him and his struggles. When he realized, he gave them a very threatening snarl, then darted behind the thin tree’s trunk, his tail tucked and ears pinned low. 

A leashed dog’s snarl did not scare them off. Instead, they continued their low laughter and talk. One pointed at him as he sniggered, saying something about cows trying to hide behind fence posts.

As they spoke, the moon set and the sun rose. 

As it did once a month, the dawn banished the beast and revealed the man within.

It was a messy process, involving a cacophony of harsh, ugly noise.

It attracted the men’s attention. It also woke a woman in Hosea’s tent, her eyes narrowed and her dark hair a mess as she stuck her head out from the tent flap.

In short, it attracted an audience.

Arthur realized it at the same time as he was powerless to do a thing about it. The transformation knocked more than the wind from his lungs. Blackness took his vision as his bones shifted and rearranged for the second time in less than ten hours; as a broken leg mended, though the damage done to muscle and veins and skin would linger for days yet; as fur dropped around him in unsightly clumps, the flesh dissolving into sizzling ash in the sunlight.

When he came to, naked as the day he was born and filled with dread at the weight around his neck that greatly resembled a noose, he was met with three openly staring, openly startled faces.

“Lord above,” the woman said. A faint, wobbling whisper.

One man - Hosea, Arthur’s foggy memory told him - raised a hand and pressed it to his chest, as if he were afraid his heart would stop.

He said, “Definitely not a dog. That’s a-- that’s a werewolf.”

Arthur coughed involuntarily, legs curling up defensively under their collective gaze. His knees knocked, knobby as they were. He spat a chipped tooth-- one of the beast’s front fangs, bloody at the root and white as ivory. In the back of his throat lingered the taste of his own blood.

He wondered if they had guns, and if he could get one. He wondered if he should kill them. His blood raged in his ears, his thoughts racing into what seemed like nothing.

As he tried to make a plan of what to do, the other man’s mouth slowly curled upwards.

“Not a dog,” he echoed without taking his eyes off Arthur, “but a _werewolf._ ”

Then, still without looking away, he derailed the most meager of plans Arthur had as he snapped his fingers at him and said, “Hello, boy. Now, you may find it difficult to believe, but really, we mean you no harm. Hosea, Bessie-- we interrupted this poor boy’s dinner.” 

Arthur stared. Shivered. 

Wondered if he went to take off the noose, if they’d want to shoot him.

Because he needed to say _something,_ because he refused to go silent when he’d lived his whole life fighting up a ruckus, he stuck his wobbling chin up, tightened his aching jaws and declared, “If you’re not too lily-livered and yellow-bellied, stop pussyfooting’n put me outta my misery already. Must’ve heard ‘bout werewolves, lest you really grew up under the ugly rocks it looks like your sorry asses crawled out of.” 

Hosea’s gaze snapped from Arthur to Dutch, his mouth dropping open and working, noiselessly. 

Dutch barked a laugh, and turned to face his fellows.

He said, much more amused than Arthur wanted, “Kid’s got spirit.”

“If that’s what you’d like to call it,” Bessie said, a bit of color returning to her pale face. “Wasn’t as mouthy as a wolf, was he?”

“He needs some food.” Dutch swept his hands out, as if gesturing at an invisible feast. “Clothes, too. Think he’d fit in your spares, Hosea?” 

Silence.

Hosea looked at Dutch. Dutch’s eyebrows went up in challenge.

Pointedly, slowly, he said: “He’s our guest.” 

Not expecting that and caught wrong-footed thrice over, Arthur wrapped his arms tighter around himself and shrunk back against the tree. His unwashed bangs fell into his eyes as he lowered his head, the fight gone so long as they weren’t looking at him. 

_Guest._ That had to be a trick. Werewolves had a nice bounty on them, Arthur knew, but only if brought in during the full moon. Were they going to fatten him up until the next moon, then kill him there? 

A whole month was an awfully long time to keep a runt around.

Hosea stared. 

Bessie said, “We _cannot_ take on a-- whatever he is!”

Deciding he wanted no part of guests or arguing adults, Arthur forced his hands to loosen around his elbows and hastily worked to loosen the rope around his neck and slide it off. 

The movement attracted their attention, but Dutch didn’t leave the shade of his tent, and the other two did not make any hostile movements. Arthur dropped his eyes to the ground, his gut telling him to look small and pathetic as possible. It helped that he didn’t have to try too hard to look like how he felt.

Just until they looked away with their next, inevitable distraction. Then he’d take whatever he could, and get the hell out of their strange company.

“Look at him,” Arthur heard Dutch whisper, presumably to Hosea. “He’s barely got legs to stand on.”

Another small, poignant pause.

Then, louder, and clearly toward him, from Hosea: a cleared throat and, “I-I’ve some spare clothes. And we’ve spare food. If you’d like to stay for breakfast.”

They hadn’t even asked him if he had a home to go to.

(They did, over breakfast. Arthur said he did.

They didn’t believe him.

He planned to leave after breakfast. But they were generous without being suffocating and kind without being patronizing. They didn’t try to put him on a leash again.

Though he planned to leave after breakfast, he stayed for lunch. Then for the afternoon, as they gave him a comfortable, blanketed spot to sleep. Then it was dinner. Then, finally, it was night-- and he stayed through that, too.

As it happened, he never left. In retrospect, he wasn’t sure how he ever thought he would.)

. . .

For a long time, that was how it was: Dutch, Hosea, Arthur. Bessie was there until she passed before her time. A few others came and went, but they were always one-offs for more intricate jobs.

It was a pack. 

Of a sort. 

Sure, most times he took his horse far from camp and ran solo during the moons. But sometimes he was full and content enough and their camp isolated enough that he could stay curled up by the fire, gnawing his way through a rabbit hunted in the sunlight, and Dutch and Hosea would talk over him about plans for the next day’s heist, and then it’d grow too late and they’d both give him a scratch behind the ears or throw a stick and tell him to fetch it and he would not and give them quite the look of disgruntlement besides, as if they hadn’t done the same thing ten minutes prior, and they’d go to bed laughing, and he’d doze in a place full of familiar, calming scents.

In the time with them, he grew. It would be safe to say that near-constant meals and a close-knit family to lean on meant he grew a _lot._

So then there were times Dutch or Hosea hatched a scheme that involved him going in on a full moon. At first he was hesitant, not wanting to tangle up the beast in human affairs. It would’ve been one thing if the human died, he thought, as he’d killed more than a dozen by bullet by then. It was another thing entirely if, God forbid, the human _survived_ and _turned_. He’d feel responsible, and the beast, settling into the idea of family beyond a ghastly father, didn’t like that idea at all.

But the plans were always thorough, and more involved him being let loose on a herd of longhorn cattle than a house full of humans. 

Maybe the plans grew less thorough as he turned twenty and the trio grew into a small, semi-permanent gang, but by then, he had enough understanding with the beast to make sure no human was left alive. 

All in all, Arthur was happy enough. 

They took on more people. Dutch took to _rescuing_ folk, and Hosea to teaching, of a sort. Arthur was their golden child. He knew it, and he adored it. Most importantly, he lived up to it. They saved those that needed saving, robbed those that needed robbing, and killed those that needed killing.

They were a family.

He was happy. He re-learned happiness.

The beast was not happy.

It wanted a family. It had been territorial and solitary, yes, but that had been _before._ Before it came to enjoy ear scratches and spit-roasted meat. Before it was given the spotlight month after month (when, of course, it wanted it). Before it had to split its new, human-shaped family’s attention with other humans, most of which never grew out their caution around the camp’s werewolf.

Before it understood what Arthur had in the daylight hours, and wanted the same for itself.

Arthur had companionship. The beast had itself.

The beast wanted a _real_ pack.

Arthur realized that fact in the way a man realizes his house’s paint has began to chip. It was the start of a larger problem if left unaddressed, but not terribly important in the grand scheme of things. It was, more than anything else, _annoying._ A burr under the saddle, so to say. An itch Arthur failed to scratch. 

Like a rash, it spread before he could blink. 

During the nights before the moon, his chest ached with emptiness. He grew restless, and always jumped to propose a change of location -- even if the lawmen hadn’t caught onto them and _we’ve only just arrived, Arthur. Calm down. Sit down. Why aren’t you eating? What’s gotten into you?_

 _What’s gotten into you._ The question and its prompt haunted him. 

He was happy, but the beast wanted more.

For the first time in years, he didn’t want to give the beast what it wanted.

When he began to shove it out, it paid him the same favor. 

Full moons became unstable. Unpredictable. Untrustworthy, for him and his family.

He had to leave them before dusk arrived the night before, his temper brittle and his jealousy unreasonable. He hid in the wilderness until up to a day after the moon set, stewing in aches and pains and concern over the empty spots in his memory.

Having grown used to having a once-a-month ace-up-the-sleeve, Dutch wasn’t too happy about his recent development. 

“Not like I’m jumping for joy here either, Dutch,” Arthur shot back, his shoulders hunched to his ears and his hands cupped around his fourth cigarette of the morning as he sulked behind the camp’s large willow. “I’m trying my best.”

“Quit fighting it, son,” Dutch said, his expression pinched together in either worry or annoyance. Probably both. “Just give in to what feels right. Trust yourself.”

In a piss-poor mood, Arthur told him a tight, “Sure,” and pointedly turned his attention back to his cigarette. 

Dutch sighed, reached out as if he were about to pat Arthur’s shoulder. Dropped his hand, instead, and shook his head, turning around to head back to the camp proper.

Arthur watched as he went up to Javier -- an addition going on a year and a half, with a steady hand and swiftly improving english (in comparison, Arthur’s spanish continued to stagnate at counting from one to ten) -- and their newest, a thirteen-year-old scrap of a boy named John Marston.

The hollow feeling in his chest shuddered and roiled. 

He felt his eyes linger too long on the trio. No, on the duo. The beast was not interested in making a packmate out of a vampire.

As far as his memory went, Arthur hadn’t bit another human since his first meeting with Dutch and Hosea. He knew the stories of other non-Native werewolves, of how they ran wild and uncontained, their good blood soured. As with most things people fixated to skin colors, it was hogwash. He felt more akin to the tales he heard indians tell, about powerful guardians and protective spirits.

Or so it used to be. Recently, not so much.

For three years, the beast’s desires grew, died, decayed, and festered.

By the end, he remembered no full moon nights. He woke up in pain akin to torture; a mouth full of loose teeth, and blood curdled; he felt as if he were flayed raw and dropped on hot coals.

Dutch, unaware of the beast’s desires but knowing Arthur had lost control, told him that perhaps it was time to _sire_. 

“Not pups,” he hastened to correct, rolling his eyes as Arthur choked on his cigarette’s smoke. “Nor kids. Don’t need you hurting as much as you did with that Eliza girl, not again. No, I’m talking-- biting somebody you already know.”

In other words, to turn a few followers. People he could trust. People who relied on him. People who would ground him. 

Arthur thought it absurd, and insulting, and stupid. He was no leader. Besides, he had the very human gang to ground him, and they were a handful enough. He didn’t need more responsibility.

. . .

The beast disagreed. The beast took the idea as acceptance of its wish by the unspoken leader of their family.

. . .

It came to a crux one hot summer night, when Arthur failed to realize he’d been followed by a gangly teenager that had once been a waif of a boy. What got into John’s head to follow the werewolf out on a full moon night, Arthur would ask and John would never be able to fully explain.

Ultimately, the reason didn’t matter. 

The beast took matters into its own jaws. It wanted a pack. It would start a pack.

Arthur Morgan remembered this: 

The moon, rising. The wind, stagnate and still. The transformation, horrific and awful as it had become. 

But then - blood in his mouth. No flesh reached his stomach, but the feeling of satiation filled it all the same. The emptiness receded under keen, knife-sharp delight, even as its source raced away from him.

When he woke, he woke alone.

He found his horse, put on his clothes, and rode back to camp-- to find a search beginning, as John Marston was not found at his tent.

Dutch told them all to wait, that _boys would be boys_ and perhaps the fifteen-year-old had fancied himself a nice night at the tavern not too far away (while Hosea reeked of heart-pounding worry; odd, but not too much so, as John was their youngest). Despite the gang following Dutch’s suggestion and busying themselves instead with a slow day at camp, the beast urged him to go out looking.

As he wasn’t in the position to deny the beast much more than he already did (and he was surprised at feeling a want that wasn’t anger-soaked or hunger-driven, as had become its normal), he told Hosea he’d search the tavern for their wayward ruffian and saddled up to do just that.

Hosea followed him to his horse, his hands clasped in front of him. “You didn’t see him last night, did you?”

“Don’t think so,” Arthur replied, ignoring the fact he didn’t remember much of anything and that Hosea had to know that.

“Dutch had an idea…” Hosea’s mouth tightened at the edges, clearly displeased with whatever idea he had. Arthur, uncomfortable with the rare tension, kept his mouth shut. After too long, Hosea shook his head and said, “Ah, well, it was obviously nothing. Be quick.”

“Will do,” Arthur assured him, and nudged his horse around and on, out of camp.

He found John not at the tavern, but behind it.

He found John not through word of mouth or simply searching around, but by smell. And not by John’s usual scent, but one soaked in alcohol and twinged with something wild, something raw, something new.

Something bloody and base. 

Something that grew from the hastily wrapped bite wound on his shoulder. It had bled through the local doctor’s bandages and spotted his too-big shirt with crusty brown. The puncture wounds went deep and, according to the doctor, should’ve killed him. It probably would kill him if he didn’t keep it clean. It baffled the doctor, as it was a wound large enough to have been done by a bear, but no one had seen bears around these parts for an age and a half. After leaving the doctor’s office with such a useful diagnosis, John had gone to the tavern and blown the scant dollars in his pockets on as many beers as he could.

He’d taken his horse out for the night ride, he told Arthur in a drunken slur, his head lolling forward and back and any which way Arthur tilted him as he helped him stand, but the damn thing had gotten spooked by the nasty beast that’d attacked him and ran too far away to be found.

“Hope she finds her way back to camp,” he grumbled, his feet catching on one another in a stumble that nearly upended both of them. “She was a good horse!”

“I’m sure she was.”

“She was,” John insisted, swaying into Arthur’s space with drunken determination, “better’n your old nag.”

Arthur kept his eyes forward. 

He asked, knowing the answer deep in his gut -- in the contentment, no longer only his. “How’d you get away? The beast take a bite and realize what a rotten snack you make?”

“All it wanted was a bite.” John bemoaned, as if that were somehow a negative. “It-- it jumped me, from behind, shoved me clear to the ground, and then took a bite, and-- don’t you laugh at me.”

Arthur was not laughing.

“It sounds stupid,” John muttered, words barely comprehensible. “But I swear, it just wanted a bite. That’s the feeling I got.”

“So it let you go?”

“Yeah.”

“And ran off into the night.”

“Yeah.” John squinted at him, loose-lipped and foggy-eyed. “Told you not to make fun of me. That’s just what I saw.”

“I believe you,” Arthur responded, gruff and refusing to look at him. When John accused him with pointed silence, he assured, strangely somber: “I do. I believe it just wanted a bite.”

“And why’s that?” He sounded sincerely interested and absolutely confused. “Beast was _massive._ Could’ve… torn me… limb from limb… easy.”

 _More than you know,_ Arthur thought, but didn’t say.

He helped John onto the back of his horse. John groused and grumbled about it all, his head pressed between Arthur's shoulder blades and his arms loose around his waist (and thus Arthur kept one hand locked tight around a thin wrist, hoping against hope that John wouldn't slide off mid-gallop). He started saying it was embarrassing to head back to camp with such a wound. He knew better than to wander around at night. 

But, he admitted, he’d wanted to see where Arthur’d gone. Said he’d tracked Arthur across the steppes, but lost him somewhere by the river as the night really set in. Said he’d kept hearing stories about Arthur being a werewolf, but hadn’t ever seen it for himself-- in Arthur or anybody else-, and wanted to know what being a werewolf was all about. 

“You could’ve asked,” Arthur said, whatever withered coal that made up his heart feeling feeble and scared and all-around disgusted. At John, for not just asking. At himself, for making the situation such as he didn't think to ask.

“Oh, yeah, and you’d have said yes?” John scoffed, loudly. “You’re always acting cagey about it. Like it’s some big secret, except everybody knows the secret and so it's no secret at all.”

Arthur kept his response to himself.

Then, as they were half-way back to the camp, John mused that his attack fit a werewolf’s. 

“It’d even been a full moon,” he said, then stopped. “And _you’d_ disappeared.”

Their ride went deathly quiet, aside from the rhythmic stamp of the horse’s hooves across the road’s dirt.

“Arthur.”

Silence.

“ _Arthur._ ”

“What?”

“Stop this horse.”

“I won’t.”

“Stop this fucking horse right now!”

Arthur yanked his horse to a harsh halt, directing it to turn off-road. The mare whinied her surprise but went with it, pulling to an uneasy, unhappy stop by some underbrush.

John hopped off-- or, more accurately, he toppled off. Arthur watched him as he hit the dirt and hastened to push himself up, his sobriety rushed by his panic.

He swung around to face Arthur, pointing an accusing finger up at him. The arm of the bitten shoulder, Arthur noted, he clutched protectively to his stomach.

“You-- _you_ -!”

“Me,” Arthur supplied, dreading the continuation of the sentence and not much wanting to help it along.

John, unfortunately, found his bearings before long. 

Lucky, lucky John, with fate ever smiling on him.

“You bit me,” he said, his voice cracking in the middle and making Arthur wince. “You-- you-”

“Turned you.”

John’s face cracked, his bluster and irritation morphing quickly into abject fear. It was too vulnerable to look directly at. Arthur was happy when anger rose to replace it, John drawing himself back in rage and reaching for a pistol that he didn’t draw but, as seen in his eyes, was very tempted to. In truth, Arthur wouldn’t have blamed him.

Instead, he laid into Arthur with words. 

Arthur took some of it, but found his own blood ran too hot to take abuse for long. 

In the end, he rode back to camp alone. John wandered back a week and a half later, dirty and unkempt and recovering from far too many hangovers and not much else in his gut.

The beast within didn’t care about the dispute. It cared that John came back to camp, and that even if John wouldn't look him in the eyes at least Arthur could watch him from afar, and that he grew healthier and stronger on the camp's stew and in the camp's good graces. The beast cared that in two weeks more, John loitered - reeking of nerves and his own beast's growing presence - by Arthur’s tent, asking without asking about what to do about this newfound affliction.

Arthur wished he could say he swallowed his anger at himself and at John and took the high road, but that would be a lie. 

Because of his own fallacies, he didn't treat John nicely or even particularly fairly. For John, it was a rough first turning. For Arthur, learning how to lead made for a rough transition. 

But they made it through, best they could.

By the end of the night, Arthur had John on his back under the full moon's setting light. It was hard-won submission, John's youth and lack of control perhaps the biggest factors in Arthur coming out on top. The fight pleased the beast -- it meant John made for a very promising packmate, full as he was of vigor and determination. Just as Arthur didn't do well with kind, soft folk, the beast didn't want to run with someone who wouldn't shove back.

How John felt about it was clear: he'd ignore it long as he could. What happened during the full moon, as far as his shaky memory went, didn't change anything for his waking self.

(Or so he desperately attempted to rationalize.)

(If he noticed how much more he turned to Arthur before making decisions, or how he lingered around Arthur whenever they were both at camp, or how he narrowed in on Arthur's approval and disapproval almost over Dutch's, he didn't point it out.)

(Graciously, neither did Arthur. Especially as he noticed but neither John nor he said how he started inviting John out on more heists, involved him time and again in more complex jobs, and all in all jumped the unspoken hierarchy of the camp to-- ostensibly- teach him the ropes quicker. A farce of a claim, as Arthur knew it was all to keep the boy near.)

( _His_ boy. His brother. His packmate, night or day.)

Months later, as John acclimated to the disease without dying or rampaging through the camp-- though one night was a close call, and saved only by Arthur’s renewed control on himself and new control over his younger packmate-, other gang members approached Arthur about being turned. They wanted the disease. They wanted the strength it gave, the power, the rumored longevity. One night a month seemed a small price to pay for all that.

When Dutch and Hosea approved of the shift in camp demographics from human to non-human, Arthur found he didn’t exactly have a way to say no.

The beast, once a solitary creature, built its pack as best it could.

In truth, for many moons-- until Blackwater, until _Micah_ , the usurper-, Arthur didn’t think he could’ve done better.

**Author's Note:**

> Did Dutch facilitate some siring?  
> maybe  
> never let him say he didn't do anything for you, Arthur
> 
> ( ........ haha :( )
> 
> visit me on [tumblr](https://unkingly.tumblr.com/) if you like!


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